Comments on: Slashdot posts Megway parody 3 years later.

Slashdot posts Megway parody 3 years later.

hobbes — Sun, 09 May 2004 12:24:52 -0800

By: stevengarrity

stevengarrity — Sun, 09 May 2004 12:34:43 -0800

I generally like Slashdot. I read it regularly and find it a good source of interesting news and stories. That said, what makes Slashdot great is also what makes it suck: anything an editor likes can get on Slashdot. This is hardly a criticism - it's really the point of Slashdot. Having seen the occasional deluge of Slashdot traffic to my site, I've concluded that being Slashdotted is like the weather - it's hard to predict, and when it rains, it pours. It seems that pertinence and quality are not key factors in determining what gets linked. As a result of the great sea of noise that is Slashdot, you get posts like todays Megway: out of date, out of context. There were even some replies that seemed to think that the Megway was real (to their credit - if this is a credit at all, I get the impression these people just read the headline and nothing more). On the other hand, like here on MetaFilter, you get a human voice. Also like MetaFilter, you occasionally get a great reply by someone who truly understands the subject, or better yet, someone who is directly involved in the story.

By: Hildago

Hildago — Sun, 09 May 2004 12:40:04 -0800

Well, they can be forgiven the lateness, the web being a big place, but apparently quite a few of the commenters are blindingly dense, too. So, no absolution for anyone who didn't get that it's a joke.

By: i_cola

i_cola — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:03:10 -0800

We're #1!

By: nthdegx

nthdegx — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:14:49 -0800

I might be sticking my head into the lion's mouth here, but... so what?

By: mcsweetie

mcsweetie — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:19:46 -0800

nice catch, but I think this would've been a better metatalk post!

By: geoff.

geoff. — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:22:09 -0800

Slashdot can have good explanations of very technical subjects, but a ton of it's just really, really nerdy humor. If Slashdot had a filter for "Score 5: Funny", I'd actually go there more often. But look at one of the high rated jokes about solar cells: "Of course, we all know the electric companies are going to call this "stealing energy" and patent the sun..." Not that we at the cool lunchtable of Metafilter can be much better, but in general after reading about ten comments of nerdy jokes about Linux, Beowulf or whatever the new buzzword is, I cringe and want to totally not invite Slashdot to the next cool party.

By: Blue Stone

Blue Stone — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:23:12 -0800

So ... slashdot sometimes sucks, eh? Like ... wow. I can think of several criticisms of /., like the way I have to wade through a ton of crap to get anything informative or pertinent, and how threads veer off into seemingly endless irrelevance frequently, but like, it's never occurred to me that Mefi would be a great place to go "man /. so suxx0rz". I honestly don't think the blue (maybe not even the brown) is the right place for this, hobbes. Sorry dude.

By: zsazsa

zsazsa — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:34:43 -0800

geoff., if you have an account, you can set scores for any category you want. You can set all "Funny" funny posts to have negative scores so they never show up, set "Troll" posts to +5 so you always see them, etc. Slashdot can be bearable with HEAVY filtering. Unfortunately the defaults there let a lot of crap through. Once a story has been out for a few hours, the moderation stabilizes a bit and any comments that have been erroneously rated high or low get what they deserve. The people who thought the Megway was real probably didn't: a) read the site (they couldn't, it was slashdotted); and b) read other people's comments. A lot of people on the site post first and think later -- a lot of Slashdot people make it a goal to make "insightful" comments that'll get modded up right out of the gate in the pursuit of a higher "karma" rating (trivia: "funny" moderations don't count towards karma). Semi-on topic, Slashdot had yet another blast from the past story today, this time from 2002.

By: nthdegx

nthdegx — Sun, 09 May 2004 13:35:53 -0800

To be honest just the thought of a slashdot regular coming over here and reading criticisms about the site makes me feel acutely embarrassed. Slashdot is very very good at what it does.

By: Mossy

Mossy — Sun, 09 May 2004 14:21:21 -0800

I tried surfing at -1 yesterday and my brain exploded. The horror. Signal to noise, signal to noise..

By: keswick

keswick — Sun, 09 May 2004 14:36:47 -0800

It is official. Everyone confirms: Slashdot is dying. Another more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when CmdrTaco confirmed that the number of Slashdot readers has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all the internet-using population. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more and more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood, spewing forth from between the legs of CowboyNeal and his big, hairy mangina. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among lowly AC goatse-trolls. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead. Fact: Slashdot is dead.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Sun, 09 May 2004 14:44:13 -0800

The weird thing is that we made the parody site of their launch site. It looked exactly like the segway.com site for about three months, after which they changed it. Anyone looking at it today would totally miss that point, which I think was the key to it being somewhat humorous at the time. I do remember a couple folks from the segway.com team emailed us soon after the megway thing launched, telling us that we need not fear a cease-and-desist because everyone in the company thought it was a riot.

By: crunchburger

crunchburger — Sun, 09 May 2004 15:22:55 -0800

It is amusing to think of some poor Slashdot reader, trapped in a twisty maze of Perl code and browsing at -3b or whatever, catching up on the latest pop culture riffs from 4 years ago.

By: sequential

sequential — Sun, 09 May 2004 16:06:38 -0800

It's amusing to think of some poor Metafilter reader, trapped in a twisty maze of straw man arguments and micro brewed beer or a mocha latte, browsing lofi from their cell phone, catching up on the latest blog culture trends. Not meant to be a reflection of you, crunchburger, anyone in particular or Metafilter as a whole. Generalizations just cause me to react this way.

By: quonsar

quonsar — Sun, 09 May 2004 18:50:21 -0800

so, who's got the lowest slashdot user number? (61695)

By: Dark Messiah

Dark Messiah — Sun, 09 May 2004 19:27:18 -0800

Maybe someone invented a Linux-based time machine...

By: Gyan

Gyan — Sun, 09 May 2004 19:29:02 -0800

quonsar, I out myself... 6853.

By: trondant

trondant — Sun, 09 May 2004 19:32:41 -0800

one, obviously. duh.

By: NortonDC

NortonDC — Sun, 09 May 2004 19:38:46 -0800

211601 My three-digit Fark number is much more impressive.

By: alumshubby

alumshubby — Sun, 09 May 2004 19:44:15 -0800

5517. Had to look it up.

By: Kip

Kip — Sun, 09 May 2004 19:59:23 -0800

659

By: PrinceValium

PrinceValium — Sun, 09 May 2004 20:37:24 -0800

I'm so l337, I don't even have a /. account.

By: snarfodox

snarfodox — Sun, 09 May 2004 22:12:26 -0800

Is this 'Slashdot' something you need a computer to have heard of?

By: PenDevil

PenDevil — Mon, 10 May 2004 00:00:34 -0800

516

By: skallas

skallas — Mon, 10 May 2004 01:17:54 -0800

sg: There were even some replies that seemed to think that the Megway was real When I wrote Diary of the First Segway Owner, which is obviously satire, I got tons of emails from people asking me about my segway too.

By: websavvy

websavvy — Mon, 10 May 2004 06:31:57 -0800

6196 Slashdot died years ago.

By: Mo Nickels

Mo Nickels — Mon, 10 May 2004 07:32:27 -0800

1700.

By: jammer

jammer — Mon, 10 May 2004 07:34:17 -0800

4062. It would be alot lower (I was a regular reader before they even had user accounts), but I held out in protest for a while when they instituted them. I've posted exactly one comment in the past 3.5 years. Slashdolt is dead. I bet someone here has a lower ICQ number than I, too. (871887)

By: shepd

shepd — Mon, 10 May 2004 10:00:20 -0800

Who has the most slashdot comments?

By: Jairus

Jairus — Mon, 10 May 2004 16:13:01 -0800

My number's not low, but... 66600. Yeah. I have this terrible habit of not registering accounts for a site/service until long after I've been visiting/watching them for a while. (In /.'s case, a long while.) My MeFi and ICQ (1564518) numbers would be at least an order of magnitude lower, had I not been too lazy to register.

By: quonsar

quonsar — Mon, 10 May 2004 18:01:19 -0800

how did you manage to 'lurk' on ICQ (217069 here) without an account?

By: halonine

halonine — Mon, 10 May 2004 20:06:32 -0800

I have 70439 so I must have been a few months behind you, Quonsar.
I remember when I could browse /. at 4 and still be interested in most of what I saw. Now I browse at 5 and rarely find anything really insightful. It's only good for the headlines (The new ones, anyways ;) ).

By: Jairus

Jairus — Mon, 10 May 2004 21:28:50 -0800

quonsar: I used my friend's account. His was/is in the 10XXXX range, if I remember correctly. I thought ICQ was such a silly idea, too. I figured anyone who wants to chat with anyone else would just /msg them on IRC.